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My response to the S-USIH roundtable on *Runaway*

The following is my response to a roundtable published at the Society for US Intellectual History Blog. Links to the essays in the roundtable can be found here.

Not long before going into the room to defend my dissertation, I was advised by a mentor–and I’m paraphrasing–“This may be the only time your scholarship will ever receive such close attention. Enjoy it.”

I’m just going to give anyone who’s ever defended a dissertation a moment to reflect on these remarks, to savor their layers of meaning, and maybe to chuckle at them a little ruefully, as I did in that small part of my brain where, at that point in my academic career, I still had room left to entertain a complex truth.

Because, I want to say, this was indeed honest advice, full of plainspoken wisdom, and yet the prediction it contained turned out not to be accurate, after all. Here at the S-USIH Blog, three scholars have weighed in on my book, Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness. I share the anecdote above as way to tell these three, Colin Campbell, Michael Kramer, and Lilian Calles Barger, how grateful I am for this roundtable and for their engagement with the book–and how I don’t take it for granted even a tiny bit.

Each of these reviewers offers summary statements so concise and so accurate as to make an author teary-eyed. More productive, if less wholly pleasing, is the feedback these readers bring that pertains to what was left out of the book, what I might have explored further, or more critically, what I raised as a central issue but did not make fully clear. These are the matters I’ll focus on here.

First, however, a few brief summary statements of my own may be necessary. Michael J. Kramer does the book a service by clarifying its central concerns: the double bind concept, the related concept of systemic runaway, and the moral implications that a systemic orientation raises, which Bateson would capture in the phrase, “the riddle of the Sphinx.” These concerns, in turn, provided a ten-year narrative arc the book loosely follows: the construction of double bind theory in 1956 through its application to the discourse of ecocatastrophe at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in the summer of 1967–and in what may be the first discussion of global warming before a lay audience.

That audience, of course, is vital to any contextual understanding of these concepts and events. As a scholar who has done so much work in the cultural history of the 1960s, Kramer knows that audience well. It was one raised to oppose, as if by instinct, totalitarianism in all its forms and to exalt individual free expression. How to square this with ecological holism? In raising the whole above the parts, didn’t one run the risk of inscribing morality into nature, and succumbing to, as one of the historians Bateson corresponded with put it, “the siren to be feared”? Fascism, with its naturalization of the body politic, had only recently been defeated, perhaps only temporarily. Kramer puts his finger on a concern that would become more salient in the seventies, the eighties, and beyond: Weren’t those persuaded by systemic thinking now vulnerable to neoliberalism and its trust in the free market as a system and, as Kramer puts it, “ultimate balance by the invisible hands”? If I could continue the path this book opens, and follow Bateson’s thought into the next decade, this would be one of my guiding questions.

Still, I think a response to the question is present in the book. Yes, according to a systems view, the free market is a system over which no individual or group has control. Like all systems, it processes information running in circuits, reinforcing basic premises, conserving ‘sacred’ truths. If those truths include the belief that human beings are creatures whose survival necessitates the maximization of self-interest, an economy dependent upon endless capital accumulation and reproduction is the sort one would expect to get. As early as 1958, Bateson described a culture in a double bind. “From its own point of view, the culture faces either external extermination or internal disruption, and the dilemma is so constructed as to be a dilemma of self-preservation in the most literal sense” (254). We might apply this description to our present-day economic system. To preserve a self dedicated to full individuation means extinction at the cultural level. Preserving the culture means disrupting if not extinguishing the fully individuated self.

Colin Campbell might put the situation a bit differently. It was especially challenging for me to think through his request for greater coherence as to the “battle of ideas” at the core of the book. Campbell identifies this battle as a battle between atomistic and holistic epistemologies as illustrated by Mary Catherine Bateson’s left (atomistic) and right (holistic) columns, which she produced in the thick of the conference her father led in Austria of the summer of 1968. This is an accurate breakdown, as far as it goes. I wasn’t thinking, however, quite so schematically. I didn’t draw so close an equivalence between Batesonian epistemology, as I summarize it in the introduction of the book, and Mary Catherine Bateson’s right-hand column. Nor do I see as automatic an equivalence between the right-hand column and the position of the “mindblowers” at the 1967 Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in their contest with the politicos on the nature of revolution.

In short, I may be working a little closer in than Campbell would prefer. As I see it, this wasn’t a single battle of ideas; it was several battles. They were related, to be sure, but distinguished from each other by an ever-changing historical context. I do think Bateson believed his more process- and relations-oriented epistemology to be superior to and should replace an obsolete, “thingish” epistemology (3, 78), simply because it provided a more accurate view of nature and of ourselves. But because I didn’t draw the initial equivalences that Campbell draws, that isn’t the same thing as saying that Bateson believed that Mary Catherine’s right column ought to “eat” her left one.

Yet Campbell’s request for more coherence on this central question is a valid criticism. Does Bateson’s thought transcend or merge the left column’s straightforwardness and the right column’s complexity, and if so, how? This is the million-dollar question, and Campbell’s elucidation of the simplicity/complexity dichotomy was excellent in posing it clearly. I benefited, too, from his detailing, through examples, of the “intra- to each side.” His application of Virginia Satir’s quadrant sharpened the theoretical focus even further.

I would only ask whether this analysis takes us any closer to the merger of left and right sides that we desire? I tend to think not. I resist a rhetorical closure on the question in favor of a contextually rich historical depiction. When we concentrate on the ideas alone and lose the messy story, the picture becomes less accurate, if less satisfying in terms of a conclusion. The dilemma captured by the double bind concept is the merger, it seems to me—or was, anyway, in the summer of 1967. Thus, as Campbell recognizes, the question remains open, as I think it must: How do we stand meta to the dichotomy? I’m informed by Campbell’s bio that he’s working on a couple of studies of Bateson’s thought that I expect will offer a more decisive interpretation. I’m looking forward to reading them.

The merger that Bateson sought to capture epistemologically ran parallel to other similar projects across many registers and bodies of knowledge during the period in question. Sometimes the merger was called a “third way” (239, 249) or, as Lilian Calles Barger puts it in her reflection, “a higher synthesis.” Barger’s book, The World Come of Age, traces this project among liberation theologians in the 1960s and 70s. It isn’t surprising, then, that Barger would call attention to “the mystical Bateson,” another aspect of Bateson’s thought that is raised in my book but not as thoroughly examined as it might have been.

Certainly, the tensions between spirituality and secularity were never far away from the story I tried to tell. Throughout the modern age, but after Darwin especially, liberal theologians found ways to accommodate religion to the rising authority of science: this was the modernist model. What was essentially postmodernist in Bateson’s thought, as I see it, was its reversal of this trend. He argued for an accommodation by science to the religious impulse, broadly understood. As a trained anthropologist, for whom the line between nature and culture was permeable, he read religious behavior as part of humankind’s natural history. As a scientist for whom no area of investigation was separable from its contexts, he concluded that all human investigation of the surrounding world was reflexively an investigation of the human. Here the religious and scientific impulses were on a par.

Much of Bateson’s lay audience grasped this intuitively. Bateson would reject the status of “guru” even though many wished to see him that way. This rejection, another of Bateson’s great refusals, was complicated by the fact that New Age-ish institutions provided aid to him during the trials of his final years. Also, starting in the 1970s, Bateson’s thought was often lumped with the thinking of a less-rigorous body of enthusiasm. The marginalization of much of what I would call postmodern science is a story that bears investigation. Again, if I had the chance to continue my contextualization of Bateson’s thought after his emergence as a public intellectual in 1967 and through the remaining years of his life, this story would be included.

In responding to issues raised by my reviewers that were not fully explored or resolved in the book, I’ve pointed in each case to the following period, after the 1967-68 turning point, to the other side of my narrative arc. That’s a little embarrassing. If I’ve given short shrift to all I did include, my reviewers mentioned a good bit of it, and again I want to thank them for that. But I also want to make one last point. I alluded above to working “close in.” In writing this book, I tried to stand meta to an analytical/aesthetic dichotomy, too. Part of that meant drawing boundaries. Some stories just can’t be told in one volume, not the way they ought to be, anyway.